You have all kinds of anxious thoughts running through your head, your pulse quickens, and your breathing becomes labored. Your anxiety changes to fear, and then suddenly you panic.

You feel confused and overexcited. If these symptoms are familiar to you, you know that you are not alone.

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Actresses Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone, musician Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and singer Taylor Swift, painter Vincent van Gogh and poet Emily Dickinson have all suffered from paralyzing anxiety attacks.

Everyone knows that anxiety affects a person's emotional state and prevents them from interacting with the world around them.

However, few are aware of the effect that anxiety has on our attention in everyday life. It causes attention priorities to shift, resulting in changes in the information that enters the brain and, consequently, in our perception of reality.

This can have far-reaching consequences. By affecting attention, anxiety can shape a person's worldview and value system in certain and predictable ways. It can also influence our beliefs without our knowledge.

To avoid the distortion of reality caused by anxiety, we must first understand the mechanisms that regulate attention and how to manage them.

According to a metaphor inspired by the work of the talented and progressive 19th century American psychologist William James, our visual attention system is much like a searchlight that "scans" the world around us.

This "spotlight of attention" is a limited area of space that is the focus of attention at a particular moment. What falls into it is consciously processed by the brain, but what remains outside of it is not.

When looking at the world around us, we focus our attention on the object we want to look at more closely. Our brains cannot process an object, text, or surroundings in detail unless they are the focus of attention.